The Search for my Lost Ancestors

Category Archives: Haydons

This is a proud place, preserved by not having become a part of the ‘progress’ which has overtaken most other old Australian towns. Its people realise they occupy a piece of history which no amount of gold now could buy.At Maldon the air is sweet, the wildflowers flamboyant, the lemons and limes fragrant, the roses brilliant, the wattles and almond blossoms wild against the sky, the elms and white gums gentle screens under the afternoon heat, and the people friendly. The pace, if that is what it should be called, is easy. The rush is over but the secret stays.

John Larkin – Australia’s First Notable Town, Maldon, 1966

Street Scenes in Maldon, Victoria

The morning after my fruitful visit to the Castlemaine Historical Society, which I chronicled in last month’s post), I took the local and infrequent bus to the small ex-goldrush town of Maldon. It was a quiet Wednesday in mid-January with temperatures predicted to rise to almost 40 degrees, and not surprisingly there were only a couple of other people making the twenty-minute journey with me. Unfortunately, the local research centre was only open on a Friday for four hours (unless there was a fire warning). And despite a request from the researchers in Castlemaine, the centre was unable to send out someone to allow me to visit the archives (which can be done for a reasonable price), as the extremely hot and dry weather had led to just such a warning in the area.

Although I was disappointed at this news (to have come this far and been thwarted), part of me felt that after the previous successful research day I’d had in Castlemaine, where I’d discovered so much more about my ancestors than I could ever have imagined, I had probably accessed most of the information available on the Haydons. And so I told myself that anything else the centre might have (books, museum exhibits) would just be a distraction on the only day I had to explore the whole area, which included the out-of-town graveyard where Ann Haydon was buried, and the community of Eaglehawk where the family had lived and worked.

As I woke to another heat-stifling Central Victorian summer day, I had to laugh at my previous idea – to hire a bicycle and cycle the 17 kilometres from Castlemaine out to Maldon (which my new friends talked me out of)! The original idea behind this crazy thought was to allow me more time in the town to explore, freeing me up from having to return on the last bus in the late afternoon. But once on the small local bus, which carried me along long straight roads through typical central Victorian bushland, I realised what a slog the whole journey would have been. And as I looked out from the window at stands of dusty blue-grey gum trees and wattle, I thought about how the Haydons may have made this difficult trip by bullock cart along a dirt track, 160 years earlier.

Bushland near Maldon, Victoria

This was a similar sensation to the one I’d had when I first took the local bus from Yeovil through the sunken lanes to East Coker (see In My Beginning is my End), imagining how my immediate family would have felt when they first arrived there from London during the war. What might the Haydons have thought as they approached Maldon in the 1850s? According to a contemporary source:It was recorded that no one could miss their way through the road-less country to the new field at Maldon because the route from Castlemaine was marked with flags or coloured handkerchiefs flown from the beer houses to attract custom. Thousands of adventurers rolled up in bullock wagons and horse-drawn drays, and thousands more walked, carrying on their backs all the paraphernalia required for work at the diggings. Dolly pots, cradles, pans and picks were at a premium at this time.

However, if truth be told, the first journey the family made from Melbourne into the Victorian bush was not to Maldon itself, but to the nearby goldrush community of Muckleford, about 7 kilometres west of Castlemaine (in the direction of Maldon). Although I had been unable to ascertain what had happened to the Haydons there, I did know that William was recorded as being a glazier/plumber on the birth of the Haydon’s second son, Charles Skelton Haydon, in the summer of 1855, a year after the family arrived at Port Philip. But by the time of the birth of their first daughter, Sarah Ann Haydon, in the spring of 1857, they were living forty kilometres away at Deep Creek in Hepburn, and William was already calling himself a gold miner.

This description from the Emigrants Guide to Australia, published in 1853, gives some idea of what the Haydons’ original journey to Muckleford might have been like:We commence with the digger setting out from Melbourne. Persons going to the Diggings should conﬁne their outﬁts to a small quantity of clothing and their blankets, as numbers of people are always leaving the Diggings, who sell their stocks at moderate prices. The best mode of travelling is to accompany (on foot) a horse-dray, which will carry the blankets, clothing, and provisions. It will be proper to take provisions for ﬁve or six days, as the charges on the road (5 shillings for each meal, 5 shillings for bed, and 30 shillings for a horse) are exorbitant, and besides, the conveyance does not always arrive at night at a house where such accommodation can be procured. A horse-team is preferable to a bullock-team, simply because it performs the journey much sooner; the time taken by the former being ﬁve or six days at present, which is the most favourable season, and by a bullock-team ten days. No one should attempt to carry his own goods if he can afford to pay for their conveyance by dray.

The bus from Castlemaine to Maldon passes through much of what was once the township of Muckleford near to where the road crosses the Muckleford Creek, although nowadays it is made up of scattered farmsteads, the original and short-lived gold rush community having dispersed. As you may recall, in last month’s chapter (see The LostBoyonthe BendigoRoad), I mentioned that while other gold rush towns soon sank into oblivion, Maldon grew and prospered throughout this period and beyond, due to the presence of underground seams of quartz-bound gold which could be worked with new crushing technology. And it is for precisely this reason that there was still an intact and thriving community at Maldon in the centuries to follow.

After all the pictures I’d seen of Maldon (old and new) and the videos I’d watched, the town itself came as something of a surprise. I had not expected it to be so quiet nor the roads to be so wide. As the bus rattled through the High Street, my first thoughts were that the place looked like a Wild West outpost combined with an English village, with some Australiana thrown in for good measure. If that sounds a rather trite description, then I can only apologise. Whenever I visit somewhere new, my brain constantly rakes through all the impressions and memories of other places I’ve visited, trying to make comparisons. And then I recalled that when I first landed in Australia in 1989, all my twenty-five year old (untravelled) self could think about was: Why is the sun so fierce? Why does the grass look so different?

Main Street, Maldon, Victoria

But this did set me wondering how the Haydons must have felt when they voyaged into the Australian bush. To see a wombat or a kangaroo for the first time must have been quite an experience in the days before mass produced books and the growth of public museums. In fact, in the section about animals, the 1853 Emigrants Guide to Australia states that:Opossums are of different sizes, from that of the kangaroo as large as a man to the smallness of a rat they leap on their hind legs, outstripping a horse, and have pouches in their bellies to preserve their young from danger or the weather: one species springs from tree to tree. Here is an animal that the learned term Ornithorynchus paradoxus, found in the mud of swamps and rivers, that has the bill and feet of the duck; the body, habits, and fur of the mole; and the internal structure of a reptile. The eagles are white, and the swans black; the owls screech in the day, the cuckoo at night. The birds are beautiful, but songless, and some have brooms in their mouths instead of tongues.The paragraph continues on this note, but this extract does give a flavour of just how exotic the indigenous wildlife was considered to be!

The bus deposited me right in front of the building which housed the Maldon Museum (staffed by volunteers and thus open only for a few hours at the weekend) and the Visitor Information Centre. Although I was tempted to first explore the town, I decided to go directly to the information office, just in case it had to close early because of the fire risk. And there, in inimitable Australian fashion, I was bombarded with enough curious questions and local information to keep me in Maldon for at least a week. After patiently explaining my situation (and dire lack of time), I grabbed the most promising-looking leaflets I was proffered and rushed out into the streets with horrified cries of You shouldn’t walk all the way out to the cemetery in this heat! ringing in my ears.

A couple of false starts later (less haste, more speed) I finally found the main road out of the other side of the town, and made my way along the grass verge towards the graveyard, situated just over 3 kilometres outside Maldon. I passed all the lovely little rose-covered colonial style cottages, the deserted golf course, and just when I thought I’d never find the turn-off to the wonderfully named Nuggety, I saw the high security fence of the Tarrangower women’s prison (something the tourist brochures fail to mention) and knew I was almost there.

Earlier that morning I’d made the decision that visiting the graveyard should be my priority. Despite the age of the town, I knew that there were only a few buildings that had survived from my ancestors’ time, as most dated from the boom of the 1860s, after the widowed William Haydon had already returned to London. Even the old market hall which housed the tourist office and archives and museum had only just been erected before William left the colony. So while he might have known that it did not become the success the town had envisaged, due to competition with nearby Castlemaine market, he probably never knew that only a few years later it was turned into regional government offices.

Maldon Museum, front and side, and as a market hall in 1859

By the time I walked through the main gates of the cemetery, I was cursing the fact that in my rush to save time I’d neglected to stock up on any food or drink. I finished the last of my measly little bottle of water in the covered wooden seating area near the entrance gate, and then began to search around for a tap (as is commonly found in European graveyards). In the end I decided not to waste too much time on this endeavour (figuring I was too near to civilisation for it to become any more than just an annoyance), and concentrated instead on exploring the cemetery.

The first place I headed to was the pioneers’ section, where the earliest graves were to be found. While some dated from the 1860s, disappointingly I could find none from as early as 1860, and after a while I had to concede that any grave of Ann’s that had once been there (if she had indeed ever had one) was certainly no more. But perhaps it had been nothing more than a simple wooden cross which had soon deteriorated in the harsh climate.

Fascinating as the cemetery was, in particular the section for the Chinese community, I had to give up my search after an hour and head back to town, otherwise I’d run the risk of missing out on exploring what was left of Eagle Hawk (now Eaglehawk). For a rural cemetery, the one at Maldon was a sprawling place (reported to have over 7,500 graves), and I realised from the leaflet the tourist information had given me that much of what I was viewing, including the main gates and caretaker’s cottage (which gave the place so much charm), had been built several years after Ann’s death.

The Cemetery at Maldon

Although the first burials in Maldon were held in 1854, it was not until 1860 that detailed records were kept and some sources even state that previous to 1861 citizens may have been interred in other places, such as The Rock of Ages (the hill above the cemetery). Ann’s burial record (held by the Victorian State Archives) showed that she died at the age of 29, on October 8th 1860, in Eagle Hawk, Maldon, from TB and pericarditis, and that the death had been registered by William James Haydon of Eagle Hawk (a painter) the next day. The document also stated that she was buried on October 10th at Maldon by the Scottish-sounding Presbyterian minister, Alexander Robb. Unfortunately, there was no grave or burial number included in the record, even though there were so many other wonderful genealogical details (including the name and profession of Anne’s parents, where she was born, how long she had been in Victoria, and her husband and children’s details). However, I did see some metal site numbers in the oldest part of the cemetery, protruding from spaces where graves might have once been.

Was someone once buried here?

My map from the tourist office showed me a route back to Maldon through the bush marked ‘Back Cemetery Road’, which sounded a lot more appealing than the long way round via the prison and main road. So I set off along this track, startling kangaroos as I went, and realised that this was possibly the way that the first burial parties would have originally come from Eaglehawk (or more appropriately, Eagle Hawk). As I walked – or rather trudged – I tried to put myself into the head of William James Haydon when faced with his young wife’s death. With no relatives around and the knowledge that he might not be staying in Maldon or even Australia for more than a few months or years (perhaps he had already been formulating plans to leave the colony), he may not have been interested in creating a permanent resting place for Ann out in this wild and inhospitable bush. And I could imagine that in its early days the graveyard would just have been an area of cleared scrub with a picket fence around it. Certainly nothing which could have compared to the grandeur of Nunhead Cemetery in South London where the rest of the Skeltons were buried (see Present at the Death), and where Ann’s name was eventually added to the family gravestone.

On Back Cemetery Road (with the cemetery behind me)

Ignoring my growing thirst, I decided to look round the suburb of Eaglehawk before heading back to the main street. Back Cemetery Road appeared to come out on that side of town via Church Street (confirming my suspicions that it had once been the main route to the cemetery) and from there I was able to take the self-guided Eaglehawk Walk (in reverse), using the leaflet from the tourist office. Unfortunately many of the historic buildings listed on the walk were not historic enough for the Eaglehawk (or Eagle Hawk) of 1858-61, and it was hard to imagine this quiet lazy country suburb as it had once been, when shops, hotels and other commercial enterprises lined the busy Eagle Hawk Road (now Reef Street).

Simple 19th Century Cottage in Eaglehawk

Over the years I have learned to accept the fact that I will often be disappointed with my genealogical searches ‘in the field’: I know from past experience that it can be hard to find any semblance of the community that my ancestors had experienced, and the further back in time the more likely this situation will be. However, I really did struggle to imagine Eaglehawk in its heyday as Eagle Hawk, when contemporary descriptions of the township described a booming population in the thousands, and with a myriad of prospering businesses operating around the main thoroughfare, alongside public baths, a theatre (with its own company), numerous hotels and bars, as well as churches of all denominations, including a synagogue.

Welsh Congregational Church, 1863, Eaglehawk/Maldon

I did feel sad, though, to think that I would never be able to pinpoint the whereabouts of the Billiards Rooms that the Haydons ran. That I could not locate the surgery of the wonderfully-named Dr. Kupferberg (the German doctor who had tended Ann in her illness, and who was much involved with the German Club and Gymnasium, as well as being a celebrated local singer). And I was frustrated by the fact that within all the empty spaces I could not conjure up the true spirit of the wild gold rush past in any way.

Site of public baths (1860) at Eaglehawk today

The Perseverance Mine (of which William Haydon had a share) never lived up to its name, but the remains of the impressive Beehive mine, nearer to the centre of town, can still be visited. Although the tall chimney stack dates from 1863, after William Haydon had returned to London, it gives a flavour of how the landscape around Maldon was changing at that time. Such constructions (along with the ubiquitous wooden poppet heads – overground structures to support the winches) would have begun protruding from the hills and gullies, along with belching steam and thumping engines, lending the place the air of a small scale, industrialised town in the English Midlands.

As local historian, Christopher Creek, points out in A Rich Vein, his book about Maldon’s North and Eaglehawk (Eaglehawk Press, 2015):In the mid to late 19th Century Maldon was a noisy, smelly and industrial eye-sore. Work was physically dangerous and, in some places, very toxic. The noise of batteries operating almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, provided a deafening and rhythmic background to daily life for nearby residents. It was a raucous place, with upwards of 20,000 people encamped and more than 60 hotels and grog tents slaking the thitst of the parched. The contrast with today could not be greater.

Before inspecting the ruins of the Beehive Mine, I sensibly stopped off in the Main Street (which confusingly runs into the High Street!) for some much-needed refreshments. Stumbling into the nearest café and hoarsely crying out for strong tea and a pie, I attracted the curiosity of the woman behind the counter, and in between customers (and gulps of brew) I told her about my walk out to the cemetery and back to the town via Eaglehawk. She was aghast at the fact that I’d allowed myself to become so dehydrated, and as she made me another giant pot of tea (to go with my spinach pie) she sympathised with my fruitless search for Ann’s gravestone.

Would you believe it! she said, shaking her head. Daryl was just in here a moment ago. I looked at her blankly. Daryl Walker – the Superintendent of the graveyard. He knows the name of everyone buried there. You might just catch him if you run out now. I dashed into the street but there was no-one who looked like a Daryl to be seen. (Somehow the name conjured up the image of an Akubra-wearing stockman, climbing into a pick-up and driving away in dust cloud, while chewing down on an Aussie pie). Alas, we would never meet, but when I wrote to him a few weeks later, he very kindly informed me that, just as I’d suspected, there were unfortunately no cemetery records for an Ann Haydon at Maldon.

No-one to be seen on Main Street!

Feeling rejuvenated by my break, I took the trail up to the remains of the Beehive Mine (so-called because miners noticed a swarm of bees near the entrance), which once had one of the highest gold yields in Victoria. Although the actual mine was founded in the 1850s, the chimney stack was not added until 1863, when it was needed to take smoke from the boilers that drove the steam engines that were beginning to be used for extracting and crushing the quartz (and pumping out water). Today the chimney is a monument to all the gold found in Maldon – it was bought for this purpose after the First World War, when the mine closed and the remains were sold off at public auction – and is a key location on the town’s heritage trail.

Chimney of the Beehive Mine, Maldon (constructed 1863)

Quartz fragments lay scattered around on the ground beside the old mine, and I stuffed a handful in my pocket, wondering if Willam James Haydon had also brought a tangible reminder of his time in Maldon back to the Old World with him (earth from Ann’s grave, or perhaps even some gold?) For a few minutes I allowed my mind to drift off in an attempt to pick up any historical vibrations (for want of a better phrase) that could relate to the Haydons. But I soon realised that I had no time for such indulgences: in just over an hour the last bus was due to depart for Castlemaine and I could not leave without seeing every bit of the town. So I quickly made the decision to finish up my day in Maldon by combining the two historical walks described by the leaflets from the tourist office (the Historic Town Walk and the Historic CBD* Walk). This way I reasoned that I could get an overall feel for the place, and note any buildings that still remained from the Haydons’ time.

*CBD is an (Australian) abbreviation for Central Business District, which in this case was a bit of an anomaly.

Ghost Signs in Maldon

Fittingly, the final place I visited before I boarded the bus back to Castlemaine was the local hospital, which in 1860 had replaced the original small wooden building designed for this purpose (this became the dispensary), and which ironically was in the process of being built at the time of Ann’s death. Would such a place have helped her to die more peacefully (knowing that it could not have saved her from TB), or would the removal from her family home have only led to more stress for Ann in her final months? What certainly would have been hard for her was the knowledge that she would be leaving behind four motherless children in a strange land on the other side of the world. Did she in fact ask William to take the family back to London in the event of her demise (which she surely realised was upon her)? Sadly, these are the things that, in the absence of personal documents, no amount of genealogical research can uncover.

Maldon Hospital

As the Castlemaine bus came into sight, I pondered these questions, then became distracted by the raucous screeching in the tree canopy overhead. Rainbow lorikeets and rosellas were gathering for the evening, and announcing their arrival with the same loud squawking as the feral parakeets which flew high above the gravestones in the wild parts of Nunhead cemtery in South London. I suddenly thought about how Ann had travelled so far from her home by the Thames in search of a new life, only for her crumbling bones to end up lying somewhere unmarked in the dust of the Australian bush. And yet someone had arranged for her name to be carved into the granite of the Skelton grave in Nunhead, possibly years later.

*

Although it has been over two years since my visit, I have never stopped thinking about Maldon and the fact that I would like one day to return and spend longer in the area. I imagine how wonderful it would be to rent one of the nineteenth century cottages for a week or more (or even a month!) and busy myself with research, while making an effort to get to know the place and its friendly and welcoming people. This time I would linger in the local cafés, hike through the surrounding bushland, as well as taking the time to talk to the local experts and and consult the Maldon archives. Perhaps I might even try to find some gold of my own!

Like this:

Oh, who would paint a goldfield,And limn the picture right,As we have often seen itIn early morning’s light.The yellow mounds of mullock With spots of red and white,The scattered quartz that glistened Like diamonds in light.

The azure lines of ridges,The bush of darkest green,The little homes of calico,That dotted all the scene.Oh, they were lion-heartedWho gave our country birth!Oh, they were of the stoutest sons From all the lands on earth!HenryLawsonThe Roaring Days(1889)

The Tuesday I spent with the Castlemaine Historical Society was one of those perfect research days that made me want to spend the rest of my life buried among boxes of archives. It brought to mind those drama-infused months when I returned to my genealogical quest after twenty years of neglect, and the excitement I felt at discovering new records on a daily basis (see BeginAgain). Not only had I two decades of censuses to catch up on then – and all the spin-off research that created – but the digital revolution meant I could usually receive instant answers to my questions. And as I sat at the computer monitor in the old courthouse in Castlemaine clicking through the database of the collections, it felt as if I was reliving that stomach-churning period all over again.

Anyone who thinks that new technology has put an end to research in the field should think again. Like many parochial records, those held in Castlemaine were not all in the public domain, and the knowledge required to interpret them and put them into context was greatly enhanced by the local historians. These volunteers (who also carry out their own research) were more than happy to help me try to reconstruct my ancestors’ lives on the Victorian goldfields.

It felt strange to be bandying place names about in front of people who actually knew the exotic-sounding destinations I’d read about on dreary winter afternoons: Eagle Hawk was not just an early mining settlement to the Castlemaine historians, but a quiet neighbourhood of Maldon with a number of fascinating old mining remains; the cemetery at Tarrangower was a sprawling place, rich in local history, and could be visited from Maldon on a bush hike via the backroads if the weather was not too hot.

The sprawling Maldon Cemetery at Tarrangower

I like to think my excitement was infectious on that day, as more researchers popped over to our terminal to see what we were in the process of discovering, offering up advice as well as names of people to contact. They knew of an expert on the Eagle Hawk diggings who had written a book about the early goldrush there – I should go and see him! And I needed to contact the superintendent of the cemetery at Tarrangower to find Ann’s grave record. Plus it would be sensible of me to arrange access to the Maldon Museum and Archives before I left the area.

My head buzzed with ideas and plans. I felt panicked at the thought that I had only one day set aside for exploring Maldon itself. How could I have been so stupid as to think there would be nothing but a quaint little outback town that I would wander around and then leave after a couple of hours? These Australian social historians who were plying me with facts and information along with strong tea and biscuits had an incredible amount of knowledge at their fingertips. It seemed to me that their short colonial history had given them a focus and a passion that extended beyond their local area to the immigrant stories of the ‘old country’.

At times I felt like an ancient traveller from that place, with my funny accent, and accounts of the Victorian London my ancestors left behind when they boarded the Atalante in 1854 lured by reports of gold in the great South Land. Perhaps they had even played the contemporary family board game Race to the Gold Diggings, introduced in the short and interesting clip from the National Library of Australia (below).

The local researchers were lucky in having access to the archives of one of Australia’s oldest still-running newspapers, the TarrangowerTimes, which has been published in Maldon since 1858. The archived articles (now digitalised and accessible in Australian state libraries) show how the town’s development accelerated at the close of the 1850s, mimicking on a smaller scale the sudden growth of Melbourne which I described in last month’s chapter.

The name Tarrangower, which is still used today for the region, was confusingly also used to refer to what is now known as Maldon before it was settled by the colonialists. However, all this changed when gold was discovered in 1853, and miners rushed the area from Melbourne and neighbouring goldfields in an attempt to make their fortune. What made the new township of Maldon so successful though, was that once the initial scramble to find surface gold was over, discoveries of quartz gold in underground seams (called reefs) were made. And with the quick introduction of machinery to crush the stone and extract the gold, this meant that Maldon continued to grow while other nearby diggings were abandoned after only a few months.

A contemporary description of this phenomenon is as follows: It was a novel and exciting experience for new-chum inexperienced miners to feast eyes on chunks of gold freely showing in quartz at their feet, and baffling as well, for few if any had the foggiest notion how to go about extracting the bright golden metal from the rock. A number got to work at first with heavy buckhammers, but in the course of time primitive crushing machines were installed, and soon great wealth began pouring into the pocket of numerous lucky miners.*

So it is little wonder that the Haydons settled in the area – being a family with young children they would no doubt have wanted to be in a more stable and growing community. Perhaps they even imagined being there for the rest of their lives, eventually becoming ‘important’ people in the town. As Maldon had some of the richest gold seams in Australia and its intact goldrush architecture gave it the honour of becoming Australia’s first ‘Notable Town’ by the National Trust of Australia in 1966, there have been a number of books and articles written about the place over the years. Most of these also make reference to local worthies and characters from the early days, and there is no reason why the Haydons might not have ended up in a footnote to history somewhere!

Replica of an early goldrush township near to Maldon

However, thanks to the Tarrangower Times and the meticulous records of the local court there was a paper trail of sorts which allowed me to put together a story of the Haydons’ lives in Maldon. This was beyond anything I could have imagined before my visit: originally I’d planned to just ‘rock up’ (no pun intended), take a few photographs, check out the local museum and leave to resume the rest of my trip (which would actually mostly be spent in Tasmania). But with the help and patience of the Castlemaine Historical Society and the local public library I was able to understand something of the lives the Haydons led in the Victorian goldfields.

The first thing that my researcher and I uncovered was the Maldon Court records, kept from 1858 when Maldon first became a municipality. As they fall within the Castlemaine District jurisdiction, we were able to access them from the archives there. My initial thought when I saw that a W. J. Haydon had been up before the local courts several times between 1858 and 1860 was one of trepidation. I felt sure it would turn out to be some mining-related misdemeanour (of which the other researchers assured me there were many). Had William fought someone over a claim? Or even worse: had he stolen someone’s pickings or harmed another miner in the process? In the end I was relieved to see that he was actually the plaintiff – or in other words, the one who had brought the issue to court in the first place. And it turned out that the defendants were actually miners who owed him money for board and lodgings (and goods sold) – a common occurrence where credit was widely accepted in order for businesses to remain competitive. So the first thing I learnt that morning was that William James Haydon was in fact a boarding house keeper as well as being a miner.

This came as a complete surprise to me as this ‘profession’ had not been listed in any of the registration documents I’d received from the Victorian Archives i.e. the births of his children and the death of Ann. Could it be that this had just been a temporary role for William or simply deemed an unimportant one? However, I later discovered that many women on the Australian goldfields did such work, so it is most likely that the running of this establishment fell to Ann. In fact, in 1858 the Tarrangower Times ran an advertisement for a Servant of all work for Mrs. Hayden at The Billiard Rooms, Eagle Hawk. Despite being a different spelling of the surname, The Billiard Rooms crops up again in association with the Haydons, so I am assuming this must be Ann. For example, another advertisement in January of that year states: Found – on Porcupine Flat, a young kangaroo dog* The owner can have the same by describing it and paying expenses to W. Haydon, Billiards Room, Eagle Hawk.

* This was a cross between and a greyhound and a larger dog (such as a Scottish deerhound) which was used for hunting kangaroos.

Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe’s ‘Kangaroo Dog’ 1853, from the collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

The afore-mentioned reference to Ann seeking help with the running of the boarding house in 1858 is particularly poignant, given that when she died in October 1860 her death certificate stated that she had been suffering from tuberculosis for over two years. And if that wasn’t enough, in September 1859 she gave birth to her fourth and final child – a girl named Elizabeth, whose middle name bore that of her sister, Helen, who had recently married and set up home in London. Even with domestic help (and without illness and pregnancy to contend with), running a boarding house must have been a full-on occupation in those days. No doubt the older children helped as well, which is possibly how the story of The Lost Boy on the Bendigo Road came about.

Of all the documents I have uncovered in the course of my research, that newspaper article was probably the most personal and descriptive. Not only did it help to conjure up a picture of the local goldfields in the 1850s, but it also showed that the Haydon’s were part of a tight-knit community. And when I re-read the article after my return from Australia I smiled to see that in the research centre in Castlemaine I had underlined in pencil the phrase who is a very intelligent boy. Presumably that is why Ann had entrusted William with such an errand in the first place, although it is hard to imagine how a boy who had grown up in such an environment would be anything but ‘streetwise’. Brought out to Australia as a toddler, little William could not have retained any memories of his time in England and would have known nothing but life in the Central Victorian goldfields

I have taken the liberty of reproducing the article in full here (including the original rather idiosyncratic punctuation) as it is such a charming read: LOST AND FOUND. – The neighbourhood of Eagle Hawk was on Saturday evening thrown into a state of painful excitement from the fact of a young child, son of Mr. W. Haydon being missing. It appears that the youngster (who is about 7 years old) had been sent from Eagle Hawk to Bell’s Reef, and performed the journey in safety. The party to whom he had been sent naturally supposing that he would be equally successful in finding his way home, sent him thither towards evening. Mrs. Haydon feeling uneasy at the prolonged absence of the boy, communicated with Bell’s Reef, and to the consternation of all, it was found that he had started for home some hours previous. The neighbours turned out en masse, and the hills and gullies underwent a rigorous examination, but to no purpose. Nothing could be learnt of the absentee save that a woman on Porcupine had seen and spoken to him early in the afternoon. All Saturday night passed – the anguish of the parents may be more readily conceived than described, and the most gloomy forebodings pervaded the breast of all parties. The general idea was that the poor little fellow had fallen down one of the numerous holes on and near Porcupine Flat*, but early on Sunday morning, to the joy of all, the truant was discovered in a tent on the Bendigo road, where he had been taken care of, was soon restored to the bosom of his family. The child, who is a very intelligent boy, and on being found said that he kept the road, and for a long time thought he was right, but at length beginning to doubt, he still thought the best plan would be to keep the beaten track. Too much praise cannot be given to the residents on Eagle Hawk, for the prompt manner in which they turned out in search of the lost one. From the Tarrangower Times, 12th April, 1859.

*Such worries were not unfounded as many children often died falling into waterholes and abandoned pit mines.

The Bendigo Road (from Maldon) today

Other less dramatic articles in the newspaper reported William Haydon appealing against a rates assessment in 1859 – which seems to be more or less standard practice in the town at the time. The following year he puts his name to a signatory request for a public meeting concerning the licensing laws. Again this was not an unusual occurrence in the growing colony, where laws were being shaped on an ongoing basis – except for the fact that William does this two weeks after Ann’s death. This might indicate that he expected to remain in the area, but could also be in solidarity with his fellow inn keepers as the community had most likely rallied round the family when Ann was gravely ill and in the dreadful weeks afterwards, However, whatever William’s intentions in those gloomy days after Ann’s death, six months later he was back in Melbourne with his four motherless children, ready to board the Sussex* and make the return trip to England. And this explains why his youngest child Elizabeth Helen, who had been unbaptised in Australia – possibly due to her mother’s ill-health, showed up in the baptism records from Brixton in 1861, confusing me at the outset of my enquiry (see Three Sisters: Ann).

*The Sussex (left) was a popular emigrant ship which shuttled between England and Australia at the height of the goldrush. In September 1861 it docked at Southampton four months after leaving Melbourne, carrying a large quantity of gold, wool and copper, alongside returning emigrants, including the Haydons. Sadly, the ship was eventually wrecked on rocks off Port Philipp in an accident in 1871.

Landing Gold from The Australian steam-ship, in the East India Docks Illustrated London News 22 January 1853

I wonder whether William departed Australia with a heavy heart or whether he was pleased to leave the colony behind with its memories of Ann and the hardships of the early goldfields. We know that when he returned to London he lived with his parents, working for his father once again in the building trade, before he remarried in 1864. So at some point the whole seven years in Australia must have felt like a dream – or at the very least a fantastic tale. And as William lived to be on old man, dying on the eve of the outbreak of WW1 (sadly in the same year as William Junior – who by then was 62), his grandchildren possibly plied him with questions about his life as a gold miner ‘in the olden days’. Or perhaps he tried to keep the memories of his time in Australia compartmentalised, out of respect for his new wife and the three younger children they’d had together. But it is quite likely that his first family would have wanted to reminisce about their mother and their formative years, especially as they grew older themselves and had their own families.

Unfortunately we will never know how the Haydons dealt with life on their return to London, especially the children, with their wild ways and colonial burrs, who had known nothing but the hot and dusty Australian bush. Although one thing I did find out was that Charles Skelton Haydon – the first of the children to be born on Australian soil – had once fancifully put in the census of 1881 (when he was newly married), that he was born on the Boat at sea, although on all the other census returns he simply put Australia or Victoria, Australiaas his birthplace. Charles at least must have retained some form of connection with the colony as his first-born son, Charles William (no surprise there), emigrated to Australia himself as a young man, becoming a fruit grower until he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1916. He later returned to Britain after the war.

But before I get ahead of myself by racing into the twentieth century with its futuristic wars, I would like to return to the Maldon of 1858. This was the year that William Haydon first advertised a share of a mining claim on Eagle Hawk Reef belonging to Bruce and Coleman, giving his address as the Billiards Rooms. A year later his name crops up again in the mining news section of the Tarrangower Times in relation to a meeting of claimholders on the southside of Eagle Hawk Gully. These miners had decided to amalgamate their claims in order to create a new mining company – which they cheekily named Perseverance (not an uncommon name for a mine at the time). The article goes into some detail about the size of the share, the dimensions of the mine and the working regulations and finally states:This is another step in the right direction taken by the Eagle Hawk miners, who are I am happy to say, beginning to lose faith in the non-combination style of working.

This idea to work more cooperatively on the reefs was a clever move, as once this type of mining took off it was not long before it was commercialised, and many of the work was carried out by companies employing diggers. The technology for quartzcrushingsoonbecame more sophisticated, and by the end of the 1850s steam engines had been installed in many of the mines, giving rise to chimney stacks to ventilate the fires which heated the water. Not only did this change the look of the diggings, but the relentless noise and dust from the stamp batteries permeated Maldon and the surrounding townships night and day. This type of extraction was to continue for another 70 years, leaving a permanently scarred landscape which is still visible in the area today, along with remnants of some of the later mine workings.

Early quartz crushing in Victoria c1861

Once the Castlemaine research centre closed in the mid-afternoon (the heat, the heat), I headed straight over to the public library to read up on the history of the Tarrangower diggings. It all seemed more real and poignant now that I was actually embedded in the locality, and I took copious notes from the books and pamphlets in the local history section, photocopying as much as I could get away with (and carry).

I was especially surprised to discover that Eagle Hawk had actually developed faster in the goldrush years than Maldon itself. By the early 1860s the township was described thus: Its busy shopping street was lined both sides with trading establishments of every description. There were practising doctors, lawyers and chemists, at least three hotels, two churches, a day school, and a large amusement theatre. The area was surrounded by crushing and puddling machines and a swimming pool proved very popular.*

After reading such a description I was keener than ever to spend as much time as possible in Maldon and Eagle Hawk before I left the area. And that night I fell asleep on my motel bed, surrounded with sheets of A4 paper, dreaming about kangaroo dogs and fantastical steam crushing machines, until I woke up to the distant sound of the early morning traffic thundering along the nearby highway. Blinking in the harsh light already coming through a gap in the curtains I had the sudden delightful realisation that in a couple of hours I would be about to embark on what I hoped would be one of the most exciting excursions of my genealogical quest to date.

To be continued next month in A Notable Town.

*Both extracts above taken from A Concise History of Maldon and the Tarrangower Diggings by A. J. William (1953)